In the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) compliant communications systems (as well as earlier cellular communications systems), the connection re-establishment feature used for recovering from radio link failure or handover failure is a relatively unoptimized process. This is due partly to the protocol architecture, e.g., an assumption made wherein a radio link failure and/or handover failure (RLF/HOF) by definition breaks the radio resource control (RRC) connection, thereby requiring a Layer 3 recovery procedure with full configuration of the user equipment (UE); and partly because such failures are seen as an error case that should be focused on avoiding the problem and not optimizing the response to the problem.